WolffOlins Blog

IS THE 4Ps FRAMEWORK STILL RIGHT?

We live in a world where things are changing fast, where the power is shifting from brands to consumers, and where consumer behaviors are constantly evolving. As a brand manager, it’s hard to keep up… The four Ps (Product, Place, Promotion and Price) framework was created in 1964 by Neil H. Borden (The concept of Marketing) and has been widely used by generations of marketers. The four Ps are the parameters that the marketing manager can control, subject to the internal and external constrains of the market environment.
 
Is the 4 Ps framework still relevant today? Are the 4 Ps still the right concepts to keep in mind when you think about marketing? The answer is yes, more so than ever. The framework helps the marketing manager to innovate based on what matters.
 
Product: the fact that 75% of new products fail at launch demonstrates that people don’t need more stuff, they need better experiences. More than thinking about products, brand managers should think in terms of experiences. How can the offer be integrated within a social context? How can product delivery build customer loyalty when quality is less and less a differentiating factor?
 
Place: the Internet opened new opportunities for product distribution. More than a new retail channel, the web represents today an enabler for a new type of transaction. How does the Internet reshape the distribution strategy of your offer?
 
Price: the severity of the economic crisis has prompted consumers to fundamentally rethink the way they act and consume. Price is probably the burning topic in any brand manager’s head right now. 55% of the people who reduced spending as a result of the recession did it through choice (source: McKinsey consumer research, 2010). How will your pricing strategy reflect the new thrift mentality of consumers? How can you leverage new saving mentalities to innovate on new products and services?
 
Promotion: promotion represents “the various aspects of marketing communication, that is, the communication of information about the product with the goal of generating a positive customer response” (source: NetMBA.com). Today, 65% of people feel they are constantly bombarded with too much advertising (source: Yankelovich 2009), and 76% of customers don’t believe the claims made in advertising (source: Word of Mouth Marketing Association, 2010). Promotion is still at the core of successful marketing strategies, but tactics need to evolve. How can you create relevant, open and long-lasting conversations with customers?
 
Don’t think the framework is bad. Despite its limitations and perhaps because of its simplicity, the 4 Ps framework still offers a solid approach to marketing. What represents each of the 4 Ps may have changed, but the framework still invites each of us to ask ourselves the right questions.

(Jean-Yves Minet) 

On my way to work every day I pass through the W4th St. subway station in New York, where I walk by an installation of Gatorade advertisements.  These images depict real athletes as they live some athletic moment of truth. This campaign accompanies Gatorade’s evolved design – a blocky “G” with a lightning bolt superimposed, and block CAPS on labels that scream messages that could have been written by my high-school gym teacher:

BRING IT.
NO EXCUSES.
BE TOUGH.

They’re DARING you to drink it.
You can’t measure up!  Why are you even trying?

This bit of brand aggression suggests that Gatorade is seriousness and performance and results in a bottle, and by drinking it you’ll be about performance and results too.

But Gatorade has become just as aspirational as its target customer – both striving hard for health and performance that the product won’t  deliver.  The drinks pack 50 to 310 calories per serving, and are carbohydrate, sugar, and sodium rich.  It’s angling to be tastier than water, healthier than a soft drink, using health, performance and testosterone as a wrapper.

It shows how design, communications, and even product development can become disconnected from the needs of the business and consumer:

• Companies need to find, capture, and grow sources of revenue.
• Consumers need something that appeals to taste and is healthy.  They’re  smarter about what they eat,  interested in wellness, are better informed, and will ultimately see through claims that aren’t genuine.
• The world at large needs better and easier ways to achieve a healthier reality.

There must be a sweet spot between what the world requires, and what Pepsi has to achieve as a business, that doesn’t require re-skinning Gatorade as something it’s not.  To do it, business and brand have to lead what’s innovated, designed, and ultimately communicated.

Imagine the customer loyalty and affinity that could come, and the impact on sport, wellness, and overall public health were someone to innovate for the results that advertising in the health drink category promises…

(Britt Bulla)

I just read Clay Shirky’s book – Here Comes Everybody. In it he makes a great point that being ‘professional’ brings with it an inherent bias and unwillingness to see change.

He quotes the example of professional journalists missing the racist comments by former leader of the House Trent Lott, which eventually led to his resignation. For these journalists, it didn’t fit within their existing structures and concepts of ‘newsworthiness’.

Instead it was ‘amateur’ bloggers who picked up on the comment and sparked furious debate about what he’d said, and then an investigation into what he’d said in the past.

I couldn’t help but think about this in the context of marketing and brand building. For years marketers and their agencies have defined themselves as ‘communications professionals’ and yet the mechanics of communications, much like the mechanics of journalism, are changing radically and permanently.

If we lock ourselves into the idea of being in a communications profession, I think we risk massively underestimating both the pace and nature of change in the world around us.

In a world where image no longer defines reality, but instead reality is increasingly driving image, anyone thinking of themselves simply as a communications professional risks being left behind.

Instead, I think we need to open our minds and begin thinking of ourselves as brand amateurs, where brand is a system of mechanisms – experience, innovation, culture, communication, conversation, creativity etc.

Rather than being locked into a single mechanical construct, this frees us to focus more on pursuing a business vision – through whichever means is most important, and irrespective of whether it is about communication or not.

(Paul Worthington)